The Canada Food Guide is killing you

‘The obesity epidemic… really began with our dietary guidelines’

The Canada Food Guide's emphasis on grains and starches and demonization of fats may be increasing obesity, research shows.

Canadians are a pretty obedient bunch when it comes to eating what the government says we should be eating.

Over the last three decades, we’ve upped our intake of fruits and vegetables while reducing fat and dairy. We’ve increased grains and fish in our diet and reduced red meat, eggs and butter. We’ve even scaled back on sugars (not counting high fructose corn syrup found in processed foods) and soft drinks.

Yet, despite an overall adherence to the Canada Food Guide — held up as the country’s trustworthy blueprint for what should be a healthy, nutritious diet — the country is in the grip of an obesity epidemic, with two-thirds of adults considered obese or overweight and obesity rates double that of 1980 figures.

So what gives?

One U.S. science journalist and author say it’s because the food guide got it all wrong.

“Canadians have, on the whole, followed their food guidelines,” said Nina Teicholz. “Everything that’s supposed to be up is up and everything that’s supposed to be down is down. The evidence shows the public has complied and has got fatter and sicker.”

Among its recommendations, the guide advises adults to eat six to eight servings of grain products a day and to limit saturated fat, which occurs naturally in animal products such as eggs, dairy and meat as well as in some vegetable oils like coconut and palm oils.

It counsels Canadians to trim visible fat from meat, limit butter and cook without or with little added fat. It also advises consuming only two to three tablespoons of unsaturated fat — often described as the “good” fat that is found in plant-based foods and oils — daily.

It’s precisely this fixation on carbohydrates at the expense of saturated fat that’s driving obesity and obesity-related chronic diseases, argues Teicholz in her bestselling book, The Big Fat Surprise.

“The obesity epidemic in the U.S. and Canada really began with our dietary guidelines,” she said. “The evidence points in that direction.”

For decades, governments and scientists in the U.S. and Canada have warned of the harmful effects of saturated fat on the heart and cardiovascular system, urging consumers to shun butter, eggs and red meat.

The evidence was weak and preliminary, said Teicholz, but that didn’t stop the American Heart Association from pushing the idea in 1961 that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol caused heart disease.

“At the time, the U.S. was in a panic over rising heart disease,” she said. “The organization needed to say something. Everyone got on board with this hypothesis and that has become the accepted dogma adopted by leading scientists.”

Since then, more rigorous, billion-dollar, government-funded clinical trials involving tens of thousands of participants have failed to find an association between saturated fat and heart disease.

“All those reviews clearly imply that saturated fat has been unfairly condemned,” said Teicholz, one of dozens of witnesses who testified in Ottawa last year at a Senate committee hearing on finding ways to curb Canada’s rising obesity rates.

The results of the hearing: A damning report released last month that eviscerated the Canada Food Guide as “dated” and “at best ineffective and at worst enabling” the country’s obesity crisis.

Witnesses told the committee that fat consumption in the early 1970s made up about 40 per cent of daily calories. Then Canadians heeded the exhortation to reduce fat and reduced their fat intake to 31 per cent by 2004. But during this time, obesity rates spiked, which suggests that dietary fat is not a “primary contributing factor” in obesity, said the report.

A higher-fat diet — one that has more fat than the current diet that limits fat consumption to 25 to 35 per cent of total calories — is healthier and a better disease-fighter than a low-fat diet, said Teicholz, citing more than a dozen reviews and meta-analyses that concluded saturated fat is not associated with heart disease and has no effect on cardiovascular mortality.

But she said many of these studies are ignored, even stricken off the record, because they go against the government’s official low-fat dietary advice. Case in point: Teicholz was recently uninvited from a panel at the National Food Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., this week.

“There’s a lot at stake here,” she said. “If the people who invested in these guidelines are wrong, that’s a bad story.”

Teicholz’s findings are controversial but have been bolstered by other studies and reports.

Last fall the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation issued a position paper overturning the usual warnings about saturated fat and focusing instead on a “whole diet approach” and the dangers of highly processed food. It noted that, in hindsight, dietary recommendations that encouraged people to cut back on fat and boost carbs may have played a role in increasing calorie consumption and rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome.

Teicholz said she is not advocating people start gorging themselves on eggs, cheese and fatty meats — only that saturated fat does not deserve its villainous casting and should be “let out of jail.”

She does not suggest an ideal fat consumption level, arguing only that government remove limits on fat. Asked whether there should be a cap on carb intake, Teicholz pointed out that before the existing dietary guidelines were in place, Americans ate less than 40 per cent of their daily calories in carbs. Today, that number is 50-60 per cent.

“Simply reversing that back to 40 per cent would be a common-sense kind of recommendation for a healthy population,” said Teicholz, a “near vegetarian” in her younger years who now estimates her diet to be about 50 per cent fat, with moderate protein and low carbs.

B.C. obesity expert Michael Lyon said the assumption all saturated fat is evil is a mistake, but cautioned against “bandwagon diets.”

“It’s like a pendulum that swings from one extreme to another,” said Lyon. “I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to recommendations about fat.”

Not all saturated fats are created equal, said Lyon. Some, such as hydrogenated fats, should go. But rather than promoting “the extreme end” and bulking up our diet with meat, fat and cheese, Lyon recommends a more measured route: “It would be more sensible to consider becoming more moderate in our consumption of carbs and choosing our carbs more wisely.”

The Senate report noted there was no consensus regarding how much fat, dairy, starch and sugar comprises the optimal diet. All witnesses, however, agreed that whole foods are best and highly processed foods should be avoided. And all of them recommended an immediate review of the Canada Food Guide to better reflect current scientific evidence.

The report also prompted a petition by Ottawa resident Mike Sheridan urging Health Canada to revamp the food guide. The petition has garnered more than 21,800 signatures in less than a week.

In an emailed statement, Health Canada said it is conducting a review of the evidence to determine if there is a need to revise the current guide.

“The current evidence review process will help to identify whether there are needs to revise current guidance or develop new guidance,” said spokesman Andre Gagnon.

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